Forgive and Remember: How a Good Boss Responds to Mistakes

Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now I’m following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the eighth belief: “One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”

I have authored or co-authored five books for managerial audiences in the past decade. If you want to save yourself the trouble of reading all of them, and just want to know the one idea that I believe to be most important, this is it: Failure is inevitable, so the key to success is to be good at learning from it. The ability to capitalize on hard-won experience is a hallmark of the greatest organizations — the ones that are most adept at turning knowledge into action, that are best at developing and implementing creative ideas, that engage in evidence-based (rather than faith- or fear-based) management, and that are populated with the best bosses.

Failure sucks but instructs. In fact, there is no learning without failure — and this includes failing at dangerous things like surgery and flying planes. Discovery of the moves that work well is always accompanied by discovery of moves that don’t.

This is why failure is so endemic to innovation. We’ve all seen reports of the huge percentages of new products, companies, and ideas that fail. One way to interpret them would be to guess that a lot of people who have no business trying to innovate are giving it a go anyway and bringing down the average. That would be a wrong interpretation. The reality is that the typical successful innovator experiences the agony of defeat far more often than the thrill of victory. We know this in part thanks to Professor Dean Keith Simonton, who has conducted extensive quantitative research on creative geniuses. Looking for the differences between geniuses and their more ordinary counterparts, he found that “Creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. … The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!”

More evidence to back this up comes from the group at IDEO that invents new toys, whose “sheer productivity” is amazing. As I wrote in Weird Ideas That Work, in a typical year this group of about 10 people generated just over 4,000 ideas (which they know because all ideas are tracked on a spreadsheet):

Of these 4,000 ideas, 230 were thought to be promising enough to develop into a nice drawing or working prototype. Of these 230, 12 were ultimately sold. This “yield” rate is only about 1/3 of 1% of total ideas and 5% of ideas that were thought to have potential. Boyle pointed out that the success rate is probably even worse than it looks because some toys that are bought never make it to market, and of those that do, only a small percentage reap large sales and profits. As Boyle says, “You can’t get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy, and crazy ones.”

While informing your people that “failure is not an option” — in the famous phrase of Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz — might be useful on occasion for inspiring exceptional effort and resourcefulness, it sends a dangerously wrong signal. True, no one should choose the option of failure deliberately, but trying especially hard to avoid it means taking no chances on change. The better message to get across is that failure is a by-product of risk-taking, and honest mistakes will be forgiven.

That may sound like obvious good sense, but consider how rare it is in large organizations rife with personal ambitions, politics, and scapegoating. If people perceive that the best way to look good is to make others look bad, then mistakes are seized upon, the venturesome are humiliated, and a climate of fear takes hold. People engage in CYA behavior, and the game becomes avoiding the finger of blame rather than surfacing, understanding, and learning from failures.

The value of transforming an organizational culture from one that promotes fear to one that offers a psychological sense of safety is illustrated by a now classic study (here is a pdf) conducted by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson. As her research shows, people in organizations feel psychologically safe when those in power persistently praise, reward, and promote people who have the courage to talk about their doubts, successes, and failures, and who work doggedly to do things better the next time.

In one study, Edmondson looked at drug treatment errors in hospital nursing units. To her amazement, the best nursing unit, where the boss encouraged nurses to talk openly about mistakes — and never pointed an angry finger of blame — reported about ten times more errors than the worst, fear-ridden unit. The key word in that sentence is “reported.” When nurses owned up to mistakes in the nasty unit, the leader treated them as “guilty” and “like a two-year old.” The tenfold difference in reported errors was due to psychological safety, not the actual error rate.

Edmondson’s subsequent research with Anita Tucker (see pdf) on what nurses can do to prevent and learn from mistakes is instructive — and makes it clear how much a good boss has to be willing to forgive. When they looked at the behaviors of the best nurses, they found “noisy complainers” (constantly sounding off to management about the causes of errors), “noisy troublemakers” (calling out mistakes by others that they could have turned a blind eye to), and “self-aware error makers” (making it known when they’d caught themselves doing something wrong, and encouraging others to be watchful for mistakes on their part). In other words, if you asked a doctor to imagine a “good nurse,” these nurses came across as pretty much the opposite.

So a willingness to forgive — even of behaviors that can feel threatening — is essential on the part of any boss who wants to set group norms that will lead to psychological safety and constant learning. But, that shouldn’t extend to a resolution to “forgive and forget.” Those of us who have children learn that this is often the response they want when they mess up. I will personally always remember, for example, the day — the very day — that my daughter got her learner’s permit to drive. A mistake of a few inches, hitting the gas instead of the brake, sent my wife’s brand new car into the side of the house. All our daughter wanted was forgiveness, and for the incident to be completely erased from our memory banks. In that case, it might have been best.

In most settings, forgiving and forgetting, while temporarily comforting, condemns people and systems to make the same mistake again — sometimes over and over. The better approach is to Forgive and Remember, which is the title of a great book by Charles Bosk on medical errors, and the philosophy he says the best teams and organizations use.

You forgive because it is impossible to run an organization without making mistakes, and pointing fingers and holding grudges creates a climate of fear. You remember — and talk about the mistakes openly — so people and the system can learn. And you also remember so that you’ll notice if some people keep making the same mistakes, even after being taught how to avoid them. In that case, well, they need to be moved to another kind of job.

A vital difference between good and bad bosses is that the former consider it their responsibility to surface and learn from past setbacks, errors, and failure. They apply their management skills and dedication to building trust and an atmosphere of psychological safety. These are the kinds of bosses we need more of if we want fewer preventable deaths in hospitals, fewer plane crashes, fewer oil spills. Not bosses that demand no mistakes, but bosses who help their organizations stop making the same ones.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. His new book isGood Boss, Bad Boss, forthcoming from Business Plus.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School, where he is co-director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, cofounder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and a cofounder and active member of the new “d.school.” His new book, with Huggy Rao, is Scaling Up Excellence: Getting To More Without Settling For Less.

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